It is axiomatic that the ability to accurately monitor roadways and the vehicles that travel upon them can provide vital information to public or private entities that are charged with building, developing, maintaining, and managing the roadway systems to improve traffic conditions and plan for future transportation needs. Understanding the nature of traffic patterns on a macro level allows the responsible entities to evaluate and approve construction projects designed to alleviate problems in areas where traffic congestion is especially troublesome. Access to travel information on an individualized basis has been historically inaccurate and/or expensive to collect, aggregate, and analyze. Because of the inherent need to assess tolls for users of certain publicly-financed roads, much of the progress in this area has been made in relation to tollways.
Tollways, also known as toll roads, provide a way for governments to finance highway infrastructure projects and to reduce overall traffic congestion by assessing tolls on the actual users of the tollways. While most roads in the U.S. are built and maintained using local, state, and/or federal funds, charging tolls to vehicles as they travel along tollways has become an important source of financing for cash-strapped governments in the United States and abroad. However, tollways have their drawbacks, not the least of which is the inefficient collection of tolls in a way that can adversely impact traffic.
Even today, some tollways collect tolls using manned toll booths. The disadvantages of this are evident in that they require vehicles to slow down and/or stop to complete the payment transaction with a live employee that is stationed in the toll booth to collect the applicable toll, either in cash or by payment card. Some of the toll booths are unmanned and automatic toll collection is facilitated by machines where the applicable toll is paid by throwing coins into a basket. Even in systems that combine manned toll booths and automatic toll booths, the toll plazas often require the expansion of lanes at various points in the tollway in order to account for the traffic slowdown caused by the reduced throughput associated with requiring cars to slow down or even stop as they pass through the toll plazas. Various automatic toll collection systems are available, and these usually involve some form of transponder secured to the vehicle that communicates with electronic toll collection equipment mounted onto toll plazas or toll structures as the vehicle passes under the electronic toll collection equipment. Many of the systems utilize RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology to facilitate the communication between the transponder and the electronic toll collection equipment. Although these automatic toll collection systems are an improvement over manned toll booths, they still require large expenditures for both the electronic toll collection equipment and transponders for the vehicles in order to function. Transponders must be purchased, transponder identifications must be logged and assigned to individual vehicles, and then the transponders must be issued to the users, who must then attach them to the relevant vehicle to ensure effective transmission of the appropriate signal to the electronic toll collection equipment, which must be activated and mounted at strategically-located toll structures or toll plazas to assess the appropriate tolls on vehicles using the toll roads.
Other advances such as optical technologies that take pictures of the license plates of vehicles that pass through toll gates and then bill the owners of the vehicles accordingly have the similar benefit as those that utilize electronic toll equipment (e.g., no need for the vehicles to slow down). However, the processing costs of identifying the vehicles that do not have transponders (e.g., on tollways that use a combination of photo and transponder technology) by cross referencing all of the vehicles that pass through a particular toll gate against those that have the appropriate transponder technology can be high. In those cases where the tollway authority bills the owner of the vehicle directly, there is also a cross-referencing exercise that must be performed to identify the owner of the vehicle by obtaining the records associated with the license plate number of the vehicle. However, just because someone is operating a vehicle through a tollway does not mean that she is the owner of the vehicle. Nor will the government agency charged with maintaining vehicle ownership information necessarily have current information on the actual owner of every vehicle in their state. For example, if the owner of a vehicle sells that vehicle, it can be up to the new owner or the old owner to alert the relevant agency of the change in ownership. This process can be intentionally or unintentionally delayed, and in cases where the new owner uses tollways, the bill for those tolls would be assessed to the previous owner, most often through no fault of the tollway agency or the previous owner of the vehicle.
Even where electronic toll solutions are used, opportunities for theft of services and billing individuals for tolls they did not incur abound. For example, theft of the transponders and subsequent use in vehicles not associated with the individual to which the transponder was issued can result in the billing of multiple tolls to the theft victims that is often compounded because the victim is not immediately aware that the transponder has been stolen. Also, the risk that an RFID transponder may be cloned and used for illegal purposes is significant in view the technology available for those willing to engage in such illegal activities for profit.
Tolls charged to rental car companies that should properly be charged to the driver using the tollways also cause problems and significant transactional inefficiencies. By the time the rental car company receives the toll invoice from the tollway authority, the rental transaction is usually completed. In order to assess the toll to the proper driver, the rental company must cross-reference its rental records against one or more tollway invoices to determine which customer should be charged for the toll. Then the rental car company must initiate a new transaction to invoice the client for the toll charge and then collect that toll charge. The other option is for the rental car company to absorb the tolls as a cost of doing business. Rental car companies would much prefer that any tollway charges associated with their rental vehicles be assessed directly to the driver of the rental vehicle, which would effectively eliminate the rental car companies' involvement with toll assessment and collection activities.
Global positioning systems (GPS) are often utilized to provide location-based services in many applications based on GPS receivers installed in many mobile devices (e.g., cellular phones, vehicle tracking systems). The GPS receiver communicates with GPS satellites, which transmit information about their trajectory and transmission time to the GPS receiver. The GPS receiver can then calculate its position as a set of coordinates. However, the accuracy of GPS is limited and depends on many factors (e.g., the quality of the GPS receiver, the position and number of GPS satellites, the characteristics of the transmission environment, the weather). Further, even the most precise GPS will determine the position of the device within 10 feet under the most ideal conditions (e.g., not accounting for line of sight requirements or adverse environmental conditions). Because tollways often run parallel to frontage roads that are not subject to tolls, the use of GPS to charge tools to vehicles as they move along the tollways can be problematic because the inherent inaccuracy of GPS systems could result in inadvertently and incorrectly charging tolls to vehicles traveling along a frontage road.
It would be beneficial if a solution were available that would allow the entities responsible for roadways to accurately and cost-effectively monitor roadway traffic and collect data on roadway usage of individual drivers and passengers. Applications of such a solution would include allowing tollway authorities to assess and collect tolls from actual users of the tollways without having to make significant expenditures in infrastructure or incur costs relating to related processing costs. An inexpensive tollway solution that could ensure that the individuals using the tollways are the individuals that are billed the associated tolls would also be advantageous.